Yahoo! Flash (R) Blog

Here’s Looking at You, FlashForward

Last week, Yahoo! Flash Platform team attended the FlashForward 2008 conference in San Francisco. We had a wonderful time at the great variety of sessions and presentations, and had a few things of our own to show and tell.

In particular, we were at the FlashForward Job Fair, talking about all the great opportunities Yahoo! has for Flash and Flex developers. You can find a full list of the open positions at careers.yahoo.com.

We also dropped in on the end-of-conference Jam-Slam session, where we decided to go whimsical and throw some things at the audience. Well, not so much “things” of a “heavy steel ball” variety, but rather ideas, little snippets of Flash apps we thought would be incredibly cool to see built.  You’d be surprised how many good ideas one can fit into the two minutes of allotted time.

Although the presentation at the conference itself was without slides, I added some slides to it and re-recorded it for your entertainment. Here’s what we had to say:

The services and APIs mentioned in this little pep talk were: Yahoo! Pipes, Yahoo! Live, Yahoo! Maps AS3 API, Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Music. And of course, the links at the end of the talk lead you to our developer center and a sign-up page for the wonderful Open Hack Day (we’ll blog about it separately).

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360Flex Yahoo! API Session Screencast

This past Sunday, I delivered a hands-on session for the attendees of the 360Flex conference in San Jose, CA. I thought it would only be fair to share this session with the rest of you, so here it is, in its full H.264 glory.

The screencast was actually recorded in 750×420 resolution, so the small player above doesn’t quite do it justice. You can either click the ‘Full screen’ button in the player above, or (progressive) download the file onto your computer from here (MOV H.264, 378 Mb file size).

Later today, I will also post the code written during this session: just watch this post for updates!

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Greetings from 360 Flex

The Flash Platform team is hanging out at 360 Flex. On Sunday we had a Yahoo! API hands-on workshop showing how to use some of our most popular components such as ActionScript 3 Maps and the Flex AutoCompleteManager. A few lucky folks won a copy of the beginner’s Flex book Learning Flex 3 by yours truly. For those of you who missed the workshop, we’ll be posting a screencast of that session tomorrow, so stay tuned for that.

Along those lines, there’s something new this year for those of you who couldn’t attend (or who’d like to review your favorite sessions). The conference is posting videos of the sessions that you can preview and purchase, and over at Ted Patrick’s blog you can view the sessions for free, and in HD, using the Adobe Media Player.

We’re also hosting an API contest in conjunction with OpenFlux. The winner will receive a game console and other goodies, so show us what you got.

As for me, I just enjoyed a great session on Flex with Rails and RubyAMF by Tony Hillerson, and now I’m attending Josh Tynjala’s Polishing Components for the Masses session. I’d better stop writing and pay attention…I could learn something.

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ASTRA 1.3 Release

Well, boys and girls, the time has come for an update to those lovely ASTRA components. This update fixes a few issues we’ve discovered through your valiant efforts and a whole lot of coffee.

It also introduces a fancy new CS3 component in the mix called Carousel. This is a highly reconfigurable component that lets you page through a small set of data, display it like a flat list (but with animation…), or even use it like a navigation control. Due to its ability to accept multiple types of layouts, the uses are endless.

In this Astra-Flex release:

AutoCompleteManager

• Bug fix: Custom labelFunction replacement
• Bug fix: Fixed error with custom data provider and autoFill set to true

In this Astra-Flash release:

Charts

• Added support for rotating axis labels. See new styles horizontalAxisLabelRotation and verticalAxisLabelRotation. The font used by the axis labels must be embedded for rotation to work.
• Added support for alternating fill colors between grid lines.
• Added support for marker labels on PieSeries. Default is percentage values. May be customized with labelFunction property.
• Added showAreaFill and areaFillAlpha properties to LineSeries. Allows the creation of an “area chart”. The color automatically matches the line, but the alpha may be used to create a contrast.
• Refactored axis code to seperate the axis from the axis renderer. Required minor API changes where some axis properties are now axis renderer styles. Also, all axis-related classes are now in the com.yahoo.astra.fl.charts.axes.* package. May require minor code changes to imports.
• New styles on CartesianChart include verticalAxisStyles, horizontalAxisStyles, verticalAxisGridLinesStyles, and horizontalAxisGridLinesStyles. These are complex Objects that contain all the style data to pass to the axis or grid lines renderers. Since the charts now support custom axis renderers, a way to pass in arbitrary styles not supported by the default renderers was needed.Additionally, new functions setVerticalAxisStyle(), setHorizontalAxisStyle(), setVerticalAxisGridLinesStyle() and setHorizontalAxisGridLinesStyle() allow developer to set individual styles on the axes and grid lines.Note: The old styles exposed on CartesianChart are still available in order to support legacy style code, but they should be considered deprecated. The deprecated styles may be removed in the future. Hypothetical new styles that are added in the future to the default renderers will likely be exposed only through the new complex style objects and the new style setter functions.
• New interfaces IStackingAxis and IStackedSeries provide support for stacking. NumericAxis and TimeAxis now support stacking with supported series as long as stackingEnabled is set to true on the axis.
• New Chart Types: StackedColumnChart and StackedBarChart.
• Bugfix: Series will throw an error if it redraws before massaging an Array of Number values with proper category data.

TabBar

• Added selectedTextFormat style.
• New Example: User Settings with TabBar Navigation.
• New Example: Search Form with Tabs.

Tree

• Bug fix: Enabled dynamic TextField resizing for tree cell labels.
• Bug fix: Corrected indexing issues in LeafNode.as

Why not head over to the Yahoo! Flash Developer Center and grab an updated copy of those Flash components or Flex components?

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All Your Base Are Belong To Us

 You’be probably heard of the many available SWF embed parameters, such as allowNetworking, wmode, allowScriptAccess, and of course height and width. But there a few less well-known ones that may be incredibly useful.

One of these optional attributes you can specify when embedding a SWF is named base. Adobe’s LiveDocs give the following description of the attribute:

base - Specifies the base directory or URL used to resolve relative path statements in ActionScript.

This is important when dealing with relative paths (URLs) in Flash. By default, the base URL of a SWF is its parent HTML page. This means if your SWF is loaded from another domain and has assets such as images or XML files, you’re in trouble.

Say, for instance, that yahoo.com loads a SWF ad from ads.com/car.swf. That SWF, in turn, tries to load “images/convertible.jpg”, using a relative path to an images directory that resides on ads.com. Given the default settings, this will not work, unless “yahoo.com/images/convertible.jpg” exists. To get around this, developers have often used absolute paths, such as “http://ads.com/images/convertible.jpg”. The base parameter solves this problem, allowing you to continue to use relative paths.

To allow relative paths, all you need to do is “reset” the base directory. You can even use base="." to mean “make all paths relative to the swf itself.”

Here’s an example of a full embed statement:

<object classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″
width=”500″
height=”300″
codebase=”http://active.macromedia.com/flash7/cabs/swflash.cab#version=9,0,2,8″>
<param name=”base” value=”.”></param>
<param name=”movie” value=”someSWF.swf”></param>
<param name=”play” value=”true”></param>
<embed base=”.” src=”someSWF.swf”
width=”500″ height=”300″ play=”true”
pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash”>
</embed></object>

If you are fond of the popular SWFObject JavaScript library for embedding Flash content, here’s how to use the base parameter with it:

var swfobj = new SWFObject(value, “someSWF”, 500, 300, “9.0.28″, “#FFFFFF”);
swfobj.addParam(”base“, “.“);
swfobj.write(”swfDiv”);

Note that if you have a SWF that loads another SWF within itself, the base path of the loaded SWF will always be the loading SWF.

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